You’ve had your suspicions, and you’ve cast many a side-eyed glance at your fellow restroom patrons when they skip the sinks and head out the door. But a new study says even if you do wash your hands after using the bathroom, 95% of us aren’t doing it long enough to kill harmful bacteria. In essence, we’re all totally grody germ-spreaders. [More]

The city of Seattle currently regulates the dress code and hygiene of its cab drivers — setting standards such as an “absence of offensive body odor” and “well groomed” facial hair, with clean clothing that doesn’t have unrepaired rips and tears. But the city is now considering handing those requirements over to the drivers themselves. After all, they’re adults who don’t want to scare away business with bad B.O., say some drivers, who believe it should be up to the cab companies to regulate such things. [More]

Spend any amount of time in a public restroom and you’ll encounter some incredibly fast hand-washers. A typical ritual includes an optional dab of soap, a millisecond-long sprinkle of water and a cursory wipe on a paper towel. You can not only set a good example for others but actually get the nastiness off your hands and refuse to spread it to everything you touch by making it a point to wash your hands effectively. [More]

When you flush your business down the toilet, it’s not a good idea to watch it swirl into oblivion. Researchers say that if you neglect to close the lid before you flush, you’re unleashing countless particles of waste into the air. [More]

As every guest who ever uses your bathroom is secretly aware, your cabinet is an overwhelming mess of old prescriptions, nearly-empty hygiene product containers and stray razors. Every time you clean the cabinet out, it morphs back to its revolting form within weeks. But some organizational structure can break the cycle. [More]

Kids: don’t try to blow up balloons that you find on the floor. Or anywhere that’s not from a sealed package. A 4-year-old boy awaits sexually transmitted disease tests in Atlanta after he did just that. He mistook a previous guest’s used condom for a balloon, tried to blow it up, and became mysteriously ill shortly afterward, with a fever and mysterious white bumps in his mouth. [More]

Kim Jin Yeong’s towel rack concept proposes using ultraviolet light to sterilize towels and heat to dry them, making them “always clean and tidy.” We’re not sure how well it would work to clean, but hot towels are almost never a bad thing. [More]

No longer distracted by high oil prices, airlines now claim that they’re starting to focus on customer service. Two of them, American and United, think that their biggest issue is dirty planes. Wouldn’t it be great if that were true?

So food from green markets and community supported agriculture is cleaner and healthier than that grocery store schmaltz, right? Not so fast, says E.coli litigation king Bill Marler, who recently wrote that convincing local food producers to keep their food clean will be one of the top ten food safety challenges of the year.

Joseph’s four-day Carnival cruise was tainted by a sewage stench that steamed through his stateroom. Carnival’s only advice was to “shut the bathroom door and close the air vents,” an ineffective solution that forced Joseph and his girlfriend above deck. Now he wants Carnival to clean up their mess.

When I was a child, I once accidentally hit Ronald McDonald with a silver crucifix I was whizzing hyperactively about my head. I remember very clearly the Catholic totem flying through the air; the sizzle and smell of sulfur as it impacted upon Ronald’s ghoulish visage. Immediately, half his face sloughed off his skull in the oozing liquefaction of corpse-like flesh. The next thing I knew, every child in McDonaldland was sitting in an expanding puddle of their own hysterical evacuations as Ronald McDonald (aka Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies) disintegrated into an anthropomorphic cloud of carrion-carrying flies. Forget Morgan Spurlock, forget Fast Food Nation. That was the event that turned me off McDonald’s food forever.